March 30th, 2007

Hi folks - just wanted to give you a heads up on what's in this build. We had a bit of a kerfuffle last week, and a perfect storm of lag issues on our hosting servers, and a particularly nasty buyback bug that spoiled the fun.

This was mostly a housekeeping week, where we tackled some persistent and irritating bugs. Some of those fixes didn't make it into this build, by the skin of their teeth - but you'll see them shortly after. We DID throw in some goodies, mostly to do with how skills are balanced and work together, and gold trading, but mostly we spent time looking into issues and fixing stuff.

First and foremost - LAG. The lag from the last playday turns out to have been hardware-related. This issue has been resolved, so hopefully you should not experience the crippling bursts of lag that plagued us last time out. Yay!

We fixed that first buyback bug, but then a new version of it cropped up. Therefore THIS BUILD DOES NOT HAVE BUYBACK! However, we HAVE fixed it in our working builds here at the office, and will be testing it to go functional again next week. Not having it for this build is a whole lot better than having a busted one.

Skill Stuff : OK, we talked a lot about Pyromancer skills, and spell damage vs. weapon damage, and several things have happened on this front. Trust us, we've been listening to you out there, and we have the beginnings of what we hope will help solve your concerns in this build. A couple of things : First: Skills now have synergies! Skills get automatically improved by investing in OTHER skills. So, for instance, every point you put in Ignite gives you an extra point of damage in Flaming Dart. Flaming Dart has a better starting damage. Meteor is available much earlier, and has a better starting damage. Most skills, Bloodletter included, involve synergies ( often multiple ones ) with other Skills. This is intended to help those skills keep pace with you as you diversify your character, and keep those skills useful and competitive at later levels. Please give us some feedback on this and how it is feeling.

Staves - staves are no longer quite as powerful as they were before. We're trying to beef up your skills, and tone back some of the super-high weapon damage from these to strike a better balance. Sceptres are down a bit too.

Rifles are FURTHER nerfed. Man.

Bows are nerfed a little bit.

Potions can stack as high as 20, until we get the belt slots working the way we want, where they'll auto point to any remaining potions in your inventory ( rest assured, this will get done )

Monster scaling in party situations has been throttled back a little

The Pyro starting quest isn't quite so darn hard

You can trade gold now with other players

Ranged weapons ( pistols ) now do glancing blows like melee weapons, instead of missing entirely

Hopefully you should no longer end up whiffing at monsters anymore! Monsters try very hard to be EXACTLY where they are on the server on your client, so hopefully you won't see any more swinging at things you can't hit. Please let us know if you do!

Fractured instances! Hopefully this is fixed. This was the issue where you'd go down with your party to another level - but somehow you'd end up in separate ones. Nasty! Please, again, let us know if you see this again.

Stun should work again

Some texture issues resolved.

A lot of housekeeping under the hood, and fixes here and there that I am forgetting.

WHAT'S COMING UP : A bunch of other stuff...
 * Memory Leak Fix - the big one that happened when switching levels. This is fixed, and we are testing. It'll be in next week's build. Yay!
 * Damage display fix - calculated damages for weapons and socketed weapons now are displayed properly - again, for next week's build
 * Stacked items will sell for the appropriate price - next week's build
 * Buyback returns - next week